Honestly depends on what version you watched Howard, the 2nd cut had the scene with the original nightowl getting beaten and killed which i don't think was in the theatrical release, i still haven't built up the will to watch the directors super directors cut yet, which is like 5 hours or something.

I loved the animation they made for Curse of the Black Freighter and the documentary underneath the hood.

As for the film, it had its flaw and its good points; but would never hold a candle to the book. I think it had some decent casting; mostly. The intro pissed me off, summed up a good chunk of the book in a 6min montage. Also; I thought changing the ending was sort of the right thing to do, a massive CGI giant squid thing would have looked a bit weird and out of place; so i wasn't to bothered about that. The lynx looked pretty crap. Generally Snyder is pretty good at his grading and editing, i like his style, and i actually want to see his take on superman. He's not a great writer as Suckerpunch proved, though he has good ideas - like the added bits in 300 etc. Rorschach's mask was great and most of his scenes were pretty good. I need to re watch it though, the directors directors directors extended cut, too refresh my mind. Big problem he has is his use of music, he seems to rely on his tracks too often, fair enough stuff like bob dylan was used in the books so thats fine, but some scenes it just sounded silly and didnt matc the visuals.

There is actually a long ass animation of watchmen, with audio somewhere on the net, taken straight from the book

and i met Dave Gibbons on sunday! WIN!

I've seen the full super long version - they still don't add Rorschach's speech back so it still sucks. As to the animation version: great idea but it too sucked. They took the cells from the book and animated them slightly (gave them parallax essentially) but then they had one guy narrate the entire thing and do all the voices - it sounded like a sinister Jackanory gone wrong.

As to changing the ending: Sure getting rid of the silly giant squid was good, but the alternative they chose was just stupid and Hollywood.

Bah to all of it I say...

I've seen the full super long version - they still don't add Rorschach's speech back so it still sucks. As to the animation version: great idea but it too sucked. They took the cells from the book and animated them slightly (gave them parallax essentially) but then they had one guy narrate the entire thing and do all the voices - it sounded like a sinister Jackanory gone wrong.

As to changing the ending: Sure getting rid of the silly giant squid was good, but the alternative they chose was just stupid and Hollywood.

Bah to all of it I say...

To be fair though, it would have never translated that well into film. The best part of the book was the 5-6 pages between each chapter which was just subtext and back story; that's what made it for me, and you can't get that into a commercial film without making it even longer! I can see why Moore wanted his name off it, poor guy doesn't have much luck with his work being made into film adaptations. LEOG sucked! and V for Vendetta was pretty good, but still could have been alot more.